Monday, January 21, 2013

Moby-Dick and science

by Salman Hameed

A confession first. No, I have not read Moby-Dick. I really want to. In fact, this past summer it was on my reading list and I even bought a new copy, but I didn't get a chance to read it. Next summer, I promise.

But apparently, I'm not the only one. Here is a fantastic project, Moby-Dick Big Read, that brought together artists, scientists, musicians, writers, academics to read Moby-Dick. The motivation was that this is the "great unread American novel". As a result of the project, you can now listen to the whole book here.

But here is a fascinating article in last week's Nature about the way science inspired Herman Melville in writing Moby-Dick (you may need subscription to access the full article):

More than a century and a half after it was published, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
remains a key cultural bridge between human history and natural history
— expressed in the vast and ominous shape of the whale. This epic novel
is a laboratory of literature, created in an age before art and science
became strictly demarcated.

Melville wrote his book — which drew
on his own youthful experiences on a whaling ship — as a tribute to the
first period of modern whaling in the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth
centuries, which he claimed to be worth US$7
million a year to the fledgling United States. At the same time, science
was undergoing a sea change as the gentleman scientists and polymaths
of the century's start gave way to more specialized and professionalized
successors.

Melville's attitude to, and use of, science in Moby-Dick
was in line with the eclectic ethos of that period. Drawing on the work
of luminaries such as William Scoresby, Thomas Beale, Georges Cuvier
and Louis Agassiz, Melville used contemporary knowledge of natural
history — or the lack of it — to his own ends.

Seventeen of the
book's 135 chapters focus on whale anatomy or behaviour. Titles include
'The Sperm Whale's Head — Contrasted View' and 'The Right Whale's Head —
Contrasted View'; such sections lay out the whales' physical structure
with a wry mixture of known facts and arch analogy. (In a witty 2011
essay, marine biologist Harold Morowitz speculates on Melville as a
“cetacean gastroenterologist or proctologist”.) Melville's must also be
the first, and perhaps last, work of literature to feature a chapter on
zooplankton.

In the famous Chapter 32, 'Cetology', Melville
attempts to categorize species of whale as he would catalogue his
library, in 'folios'. It was a playful gesture that reflected the fluid
classification of cetacean species at the time.

Also, the characters embody the change in thinking:

Of course, the greatest scientific figure of the age hovers over
Melville. Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, eight years
after Moby-Dick came out. Melville's sole mention of Darwin is a quote —
from Darwin's Voyage of a Naturalist (sic) — in the extracts at the
start of Moby-Dick. He had read Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle (1839) in
preparation for his own 1854 work, The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles —
as the Galapagos were then known. Melville visited the islands in 1841,
six years after Darwin's fateful landing. Darwin's recorded observation
of marine iguanas as “imps of darkness” seemed to set the tone for
Melville's metaphoric view of the Galapagos, which he saw as
“five-and-twenty heaps of cinders ... In no world but a fallen one could
such lands exist”.

Such dark analogies are in line with a man who declared all human
science to be “but a passing fable” — and yet created a fable of his
own. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael is a perpetually sceptical and
questioning figure, a man attuned to science — a stark contrast to the
vengeful Ahab and his pursuit of the whale that “dismasted” him. As the
critic Eric Wilson, in his essay 'Melville, Darwin, and the Great Chain
of Being', notes, a “primary subtext of Melville's novel is the passing
of pre-Darwinian, anthropocentric thought, espoused by Ahab, and the
inauguration of a version of Darwin's more ecological evolution,
proffered by Ishmael”.

Melville lived through that process. US Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Nature
(1836), with its declaration of moral law at the heart of the cosmos,
was the new philosophy of Melville's youth. But as biographer Andrew
Delbanco points out, Melville read A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), William Dean Howells's Darwinian-inflected view of society. Moby-Dick
itself has been seen as a parody of the Transcendentalists'
'back-to-nature' excesses. But Melville does more than lambast
philosophy or use science as interior decoration. He achieved a
marvellous synthesis of his own poetic and philosophical impulse with
the increasingly science-aware ethos of his age. And he did so with a
sense of black humour that transcended Transcendentalism to prove that
nature — and its science — was much stranger and more wonderful than
they had imagined.

Read the full article here. And in case you are interested in the evolution of whales, you can find some information here, including that of Pakicetus.

1 comment:

I truly do not get why so many [otherwise] intelligent people get so exercised -- intimidated or horrified, even -- at the prospect of engaging Moby Dick.There is nothing in the language, plotting, style, or issues entertained that your average high-school senior (US version -- and we are NOT known for the severity of our secondary education) couldn't handle.The diction and sentence structure are far closer to ours than they are to, say, Shakespeare's. The themes are (to me, at least) more accessible and meaningful than those of the Brontes or Austen. And it's fun -- the 19th century's version of "Jaws," but with more convincing special effects.You don't have to set aside a summer for it, either. An hour or less a night, and you'll be through it in no time.

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Irtiqa is a Science and Religion blog. It tracks and comments on news relevant to the interplay of science & religion - with a focus on scientific debates taking place in the Muslim world. Irtiqa literally means evolution in Urdu. But it does not imply only biological evolution. Instead, it is an all encompassing word used for evolution of the universe, biological evolution, and also for biological/human development. While it has created confusion in debates over biological evolution in South Asia, it provides a nice integrative name for a blog that addresses issues of science & religion. For further information, contact Salman Hameed.

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On Muslims and Evolution

Salman Hameed

Salman is an astronomer and Associate Professor of Integrated Science & Humanities at Hampshire College, Massachusetts. Currently, he is working on understanding the rise of creationism in contemporary Islamic world and how Muslims view the relationship between science & religion. He is also working with historian Tracy Leavelle at Creighton University to analyze reconciliation efforts between astronomers and Native Hawaiians over telescopes on top of sacred Mauna Kea in Hawaii. He teaches “History and Philosophy of Science & Religion” with philosopher Laura Sizer, and “Science in the Islamic World”, both at Hampshire College. Salman and Laura Sizer are also responsible for the ongoing Hampshire College Lecture Series on Science & Religion, and you can find videos of all these lectures below. Contact information here.